Tucci: EMC The Building Block For Hybrid Clouds

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EMC is leveraging its leading market positions in storage, virtualization, and security technologies to take advantage of massive changes in the IT industry and make itself the premier building block for cloud computing.

That's the message from Joe Tucci, EMC's chairman, president, and CEO, who on Tuesday told financial and industry analysts at the company's Strategic Forum that cloud computing is the biggest wave of change facing the IT industry.

"I totally believe there is no sector of the industry...that is immune to the cloud," Tucci said.

Those changes, which will be felt in 2011 and for years to come, include a number of what Tucci termed IT and consumer "megatrends" that are presenting both opportunities and challenges for IT.

Furthermore, users have a growing appetite for information, and by sharing that information generate even more, Tucci said.

IT departments also have to deal with new ways of building applications to meet the needs of users increasingly turning to devices like Apple's iPad and iPhone even as they need to continue supporting core legacy applications.

At the same time, companies are rapidly adopting hybrid cloud computing, and are looking for assurance that issues related to security and trust in the cloud are addressed, he said.

Several surveys of top IT spending priorities place server virtualization, security, and cloud computing in the top three, Tucci said. "This bodes well for where we have strength," he said.

In the meantime, customers are dealing with too many different operating environments, juggling too many data centers populated with products from too many vendors, and spending too much on customized applications, which Tucci said translates in about 69 percent of all IT spending going to maintaining their IT infrastructures and only 31 percent going to increasing their revenue.

At the same time, the amount of data being stored in 2020 is expected to grow by 44 times the amount stored in 2009, and it all needs to be protected and secured, he said.

The only way for companies to address these challenges will be to adopt information-as-a-service (IaaS) platforms, which is another way of saying hybrid cloud computing, Tucci said.

With hybrid clouds, customers can move from manually building new services to doing so in a much more automated fashion, Tucci said. For instance, customers should be able to set their required SLAs (service level agreements) and policies such as security, availability, and replication requirements, into an application like VMware's vSphere, which will then dynamically provide the needed virtualized resources. vSphere also provisions applications to run in public and/or private clouds, he said.

With vSphere, customers can both future-proof existing applications by transforming them to work on hybrid clouds and take advantage of new development frameworks like Spring and Ruby on Rails to build new applications, Tucci said.